Becoming la raza: Chican@ counterpublicity and rhetorics of the Viet Nam War

Izaguirre III, Jose G.

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Description

Title

Becoming la raza: Chican@ counterpublicity and rhetorics of the Viet Nam War

Author(s)

Izaguirre III, Jose G.

Issue Date

2020-07-10

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Cisneros, Josue D.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Cisneros, Josue D.

Committee Member(s)

• Finnegan, Cara A.
• Murphy, John M.
• O'Gorman, Ned
• Romero, Rolando J.

Department of Study

Communication

Discipline

Communication

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Date of Ingest

2020-10-07T22:48:07Z

Keyword(s)

la raza, Latin@ vernacular discourse, Chican@ movement, rhetorical history, social movement rhetoric

Abstract

This study supplies a rhetorical history of Chican@ movement discourse(s) positing racial otherness through the language of “la raza” in the United States during the Viet Nam War. Racial discourse(s) advancing notions of La Raza were circulated, amplified, stretched, and even resisted among Chican@ movement activists at the end of the 1960s. I call these racial discourses associated with the Chican@ movement raza rhetorics. In this study, I define raza rhetorics as Chican@ movement vernacular discourses that eschewed and disentangled the effects of institutionalized whiteness from the aesthetics of Mexican American politics by (re)inventing a racialized public identity: La Raza. Reproduced, circulated, amplified, and visualized in Chican@ counterpublic spaces, where resistance to dominant and hegemonic discourse(s) undergirding political life occurs in earnest, raza rhetorics proliferated across the Southwest United States at the end of the 1960s as a coincident feature of Chican@ movement. My interest in these raza rhetorics lies particularly in their poetics, the re-presentational praxis of these discourse(s) cultivating racial formation(s), fomenting racial division(s), and activating Mexican Americans politically along racial lines in the latter 1960s. In this study, I propose a rhetorical history of raza rhetorics circulating in and around Colorado, New Mexico, and California from 1967 to 1970, and, from my analysis, I conclude that raza rhetorics were a diverse and multiplicitous form of Chican@ movement vernacular discourse that compelled and forwarded aesthetic alternatives for Mexican American public affairs other than those imposed in and through institutionalized whiteness.

Graduation Semester

2020-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108666

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2020 José G. Izaguirre III

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